Twitter works best when you are you, and as a friendly open channel, the more you show your personality, the more you will be noticed and the more people will make a point of tweeting to you, RTing you, etc. As a basic rule, the first thing to do is change your profile picture – nobody wants to be an egg. Read the post “Dont Be an Egg“.

While there is much talk about whether Twitter is “as big as it used to be” or “going down the pan” you have to remember a few things about Twitter.

So, remember, by nature, Twitter is:

Real time – though you can preschedule tweets, when it comes to real time news and commentary, Twitter wins

Short and snappy – luckily at the time of writing they havent made the much talked about change of increasing the character limit beyond 140

Transient – tweets get buried by more tweets – a good thing and a bad thing

Open – you can tweet to anyone you want

So what strategies can you put in place?

It’s best to not be haphazard, however off the cuff you may think Twitter is. If you are a business, you need to put in a little bit of strategy, so you can meet the people you want to meet, and give the right impression at the same time. Some tips:

Create Twitter lists to group poeple together by type– for example:

Clients

Folks I know

People we work with

Look at these lists periodically and if you see someone you know / who is familiar to you that you can chat to, banter with, reply to, or “quote tweet” then do so! This will mean you look out for these people pro actively, rather than the random off chance they happen to appear in your feed when you are checking Twitter. By doing this you are more likely to keep in touch with people you want to build relationships with.

Mix up the different types of tweets

Variety is important, so people who follow you on Twitter or check your latest few tweets dont think “all you ever do on Twitter is ___”. You don’t want people thinking that! Mix up your link sharing tweets with your links to your own blog posts and content with the above type of interaction tweet.

Get the real time thing going

When you are having a meeting with someone, take a selfie and tweet together.

Showcase the niceness

If someone says something about you, Retweet with a quote reply

Involve others in your team

If you are the person in your company responsible for doing Twitter for your company, and you are finding it’s all weighing heavily on your shoulders, you need to plant seeds. It’s a project management task, but it doesnt have to take a lot of time. Here’s how you do this.

Ask questions to the team on rotation – each week send an email to each team member with one question from the below. Repeat this with a new question each week and then rotate. Keep track somehow. This will help generate Twitter ideas, images, stories, and help the team start to remember to notice things for social media sharing.

“What’s the most interesting thing that happened to you / the company this week”
“What was the biggest hurdle this week?”
“Which client do you love right now and why?”
“What was the last question someone asked you?”

Getting these answers from the team will mean you can share things that are interesting with your followers from the whole company, not just you who has been “tasked with Twitter”.

Excuses? A thing of the past!

So, no more “we are doing our one Tweet a day” from you, the above ideas mean there is an abundance of ways to be interesting, engaging and strategic on Twitter.

Over time, you will develop your Twitter personality more and more, and this will become second nature – you will know who you want to target and what you should be tweeting about. Twitter will be a part of life!

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About the Author

Keren Lerner

Keren is the founder and CEO of Top Left Design and runs it with passion and drive. She truly believes that communication is the key to making the world a better place and loves how great design and marketing makes it easier to communicate and understand.